“Did a quick search on her,” Mia said, nodding toward her phone. Wi-Fi was spotty even in the best of times. But if you stood just right, sent up the right kind of prayers, and threw salt over your shoulder, you could sometimes get a signal of some kind if you weren’t in the middle of a storm. “There wasn’t much to find, beyond the fact that apparently she’s taken over the Boston art scene.”

“Man, did I get into the wrong profession.” Izzy shook her head, then leaned forward, her elbow on the table, her hand propping up her head. “Anyway, you want to know my thoughts?”

“Please.”

“It feels like there’s something big we’re not seeing,” Izzy said. “And we’re trying to work two cases, without really working either.”

“The reporter’s death,” Mia said slowly. “And whatever he was poking into.”

“What if we keep chasing him down this hole but there’s nothing at the bottom?” Izzy pushed her fingers through her hair, disrupting the style so that the pink strands stood on end, a ruffled cockatoo. “I’m not saying we’re not onto something. The phone message was strange. I just . . .”

“Don’t want to get bogged down,” Mia finished for her. There was also an elephant in the room, and Mia was part grateful and part uneasy that Izzy wasn’t mentioning it.

Did you kill them?

It was Ellen’s voice in Mia’s head, but the question flitted across Izzy’s face anytime she thought Mia wasn’t looking.

Mia scratched at her wrist. That figure in the woods on their first night, the man under a streetlamp, the questions digging into Mia’s past—they were itches she couldn’t scratch, and they burned beneath her skin. But they had to stop dancing around this. “If we’re completely on the wrong track, if he got into a fight with someone on the island and this is a personal beef, I think Mama would have told me.”

There was a beat of silence. “Would she?”

Mia thought about their conversation from the first night. “She’s worried about me.”

“Isn’t that what mothers do?” A slight smile turned the question almost teasing, rather than challenging.

How to explain it?

“Living here isn’t easy,” Mia started, because that couldn’t be said often enough. “Everyone here depends on each other in some way. All those people with multiple jobs? It’s because people stepped up where there was a need.”

Izzy nodded.